Virginia Hughes

Starting in 2003 and continuing every year since, the National Science Foundation and Science magazine have issued a formidable challenge: Create an illustration, photo, graphic, or interactive media that effectively communicates some aspect of science. This year’s winners were just published in today’s Science.

This beauty, the first-place winner in the photography category, was created by radiologist Kai-hung Fung from the Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital in Hong Kong. Its title: “What lies behind our nose?” As the NSF website explains:

Human anatomy it may be, but the airways that riddle the space behind our noses take on an alien aspect in this unearthly rendering… A computed tomography (CT) scan from a 33-year-old Chinese woman being examined for thyroid disease provided the raw data for Fung’s rendering. He stacked together 182 thin CT “slices” to create a 3D image looking upward at the sinuses from underneath the head. Normally, CT renderings meld slices together into smooth surfaces, but, in what he terms the “Rainbow Technique,” Fung instead broke them apart, creating a topographical map of the airspaces described by the contour lines of individual slices, and colored according to the density of the tissues that border them.

Birds are smart as hell. My fellow Seed-er and blogger Jonah Lehrer recently wrote a piece for the Boston Globe about the tiny yet surprisingly complex brains of birds. In light of the emails I received RE: my last post, about the short-term memory of chimps, I thought I’d list a few interesting tidbits from Jonah’s piece:

• The songs of starlings display a sophisticated grammar once thought the sole domain of human thinking.
• A nutcracker can remember the precise location of hundreds of different food storage spots.
• Crows in Japan have learned how to get people to crack walnuts for them: They drop them near busy intersections, then retrieve the smashed nuts when the traffic light turns red.

One researcher whom Jonah talked to, Cambridge comparative psychologist Nicola Clayton, said that even though most people think of apes as the most intelligent non-humans, “birds have achieved a sort of honorary ape status, just with a few feathers attached.” (Aww, how media-savvy of her.)

For instance, the New Caledonian crow pictured here uses a stick to dig mealworms out of a hole in a piece of wood. A few years ago, Oxford zoologists discovered that, just as humans are usually right or left-handed, the crows either hold the stick in their right or left cheek. These lateral preferences are extremely rare; only have of all chimps always use the same hand for tool use.

As for why birds (and chimps, and bees, and termites, and whales, and dolphins, and pigs) are so smart, some ecologists theorize that intelligence is a common byproduct in any socially complex animal society. In other words, it takes a lot of thinking power to understand—or manipulate—the dynamics among the many individuals within a group.

Check out more photos and movies of crows using tools.

A lot of ba-hoo-ey gets thrown around philosophy/psychology circles about what makes us different (read: smarter) than the rest of the animal kingdom. My first college course on animal behavior—where I read about the internal odometers in Saharan desert ants that allow them to pinpoint their nests after foraging for food many miles away; or the termites that cooperate over several generations to build huge mounds that keep their brood within a narrow temperature range; or the crows that, without training, use tools to modify other tools, and sometimes intentionally deceive each other—showed me how flawed that attitude is. But even if you narrow the definition of intelligence to “higher” cognitive skills, like language, object recognition, planning, or categorization, the following video will likely make you question our self-appointed seat at the top of the smartness ladder:

The star is Ai, a 30-year-old (23 in the video) female chimp who lives at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Center. As the video shows, Ai was trained to put in order, from smallest to largest, numerals that appeared on a computer screen. That she learned to do this accurately is a remarkable feat. But more incredible, in another series of experiments, white boxes appeared over the numbers almost immediately after they first flashed on screen. Even though Ai only had that split second to look at the numbers, she remembered where they were and was still able to put them in the correct order. And when humans performed the same experiment, they were much, much less accurate.

The research, conducted by Tetsuro Matsuzawa and Nobuyuki Kawai in the Aichi Prefecture, was published in the January 6, 2000 issue of Nature. The scientists say that Ai is the first nonhuman animal that understands the ordinal nature of numbers and the concept of zero.

Ai’s caretakers also taught her the concept of money. She uses 100-yen coins to purchase apples from a fake vending machines.

Chimps are equally smart or smarter than us in other ways, too: They’re better at recognizing upside-down faces; they can discriminate among 200 species of plants; and when trained to label primary colors, they’ll place them in the same area of the visual spectrum as humans.

Since chimps have the mental capacity that is arguably equivalent to that of a young child or mentally retarded adult, interesting legal questions arise regarding their exploitation by humans. A Viennese court is now considering assigning a legal guardian to a 26-year-old chimp, a privilege that has never been granted to a non-human before.

The delightful Science Creative Quarterly is giving away a new iPod to anybody who links to the truth before December 13, 2007. I’ll now link to the truth because I want to win (the battery on my current iPod Mini lasts about as long as a Big Mac in front of Michael Moore) , but more because I’m a huge fan of the truth.

The SCQ’s goal is to have the truth come up as the #1 Google search for keyword “truth.” (As of this morning, the conspiratorial 911truth.org is ranked #7, which turns my stomach a bit…) This tactic, sometimes called “Google bombing” or “viral marketing,” works because the Google ranking algorithm puts great weight in how frequently a site is linked by other sites (and especially high-traffic sites).

The truth, for those who have not yet clicked away from this page, is a list of 15 declarative sentences that I wish all of our teachers and policy makers recognized as true. I won’t list them all here, because I want you to find truth yourself. But my top three:

• Wilco is good, sometimes exceptional, but often inconsequential. (see the Wilco effect)
• It’s not all relative.
• Science, for better or for worse, is all around.

I’m reading a fascinating, if slightly unpolished, book: Sex, Drugs, & DNA by Michael Stebbins. The first chapter basically outlines the life of a scientist—from competing against those annoying premeds in undergrad lectures, to six years of tedious graduate school, to keeping a $35,000-a-year (yet 90-hour-a-week) post-doc, to wishing, in vain, for a tenured position anywhere.

Stebbins, a trained geneticist who was once a senior editor of Nature Genetics and is now Director of Biology Policy for the Federation of American Scientists, obviously didn’t fare so terribly himself. Nevertheless, if my own conversations with American science grad students and post-docs mean anything, then the sad picture he paints is dead-on.

The only thing driving these tired, underpaid, and undervalued scientists, Stebbins argues, is their passion for science—an inner spirit of inquiry that just won’t rest. I love this Homeric spin, perhaps because after all of those crude and pessimistic paragraphs, I needed to hear something rosy. And more because I know it’s true: Scientists question, look for answers, and question again. “Finding out” is what keeps them running in the rat race.

Take, for example, a recent blog carnival at Clastic Detritus, in which bloggers respond to “Why I’m a Geophysicist.” (A geophysicist is, logically enough, a scientist who studies the physics of the Earth—things like seismic waves, gravitational fields, magnetic poles, etc.)

Here are some poignant/nerdy/cheesy (? naw…) snippets:

“The rocks kept calling. Not just any rocks. Rocks that had been through a lot and had stories to tell. Rocks that had been buried, contorted, heated, transformed. Rocks that were once under the equivalent of the Himalayas (120 million years ago, or 380 million years ago, or 1.7 billion years ago). Down a subduction zone. Stretched and thinned in a metamorphic core complex. Baked in the aureole of a pluton. Metamorphic rocks are the survivors of geology. They have been through it all, and it has changed them, but they haven’t melted or broken apart.

…And I like to know their stories.” -Kim

“…By the end of the year I’d subjectively decreed that computers, dealing with millionths of a second, were intellectually pale in comparison to every major natural science expressed through the theme of millions of years.” -Chris

“Another aspect of geology that got me hooked at an early point in my studies was the field. The field is where we get to observe products of geologic processes firsthand. The field is where the spatial and temporal complexity of geology is laid out in its glory. The field is where we realize and reflect on the vastness of geologic time.” -Brian

“I used to be bored with I-80 across Nevada, now I am always envisioning rotational normal faults and half-grabens. And don’t even get me started on having the window seat on a clear day flying over the Sierra Nevada, canoing on kettle lakes, or staring at the “marble” or “granite” counter tops in the local coffee shop. If I am stuck at a boring party with no one interesting to talk to, I can entertain myself for hours with a stone fireplace.” -Thermochronic

You may think that Labor Day is the only holiday worth celebrating this weekend. You’d be wrong.

Sunday, September 2 marks the first annual International Rock-Flipping Day. As its co-creator, Via Negative, describes (emphasis mine):

The point is simply to have fun, and hopefully learn something at the same time. We don’t want to over-determine what that something should be: those of a more scientific frame of mind might focus on i.d.s or ecological interactions, while those of an artistic or poetic bent could go in a different direction entirely. Pictures alone would suffice, of course. But whatever you do, please be sure to replace all rocks that you flip as soon as possible, so as not to disrupt the natives’ lives unduly. (Unless, that is, you plan on incorporating some of what you find into your next meal — crawdads? escargots? — which would also make a interesting subject for an International Rock-Flipping Day blog post, I’m thinking.)

Though I’m not so interested in eating any under-rock creatures, I’ll try to do some flipping tomorrow at my local outdoor bar. And if I find anything interesting, I’ll take a picture. If you do the same, be sure to upload them to Via Negative’s Flickr group.

And Happy Labor Day, too!